Enterprises commonly maintain several tiers of storage that satisfy a wide range of price and performance requirements. Some enterprises utilize virtual storage. Some storage arrays act as a “virtualizer” to other storage arrays and provide customers with more choices for storage tiers.
In spite of the benefits of virtualized or external storage, new challenges arise. One of these challenges is how to handle a loss of connection or service between the virtualizing array and the virtualized or external array. Other challenges exist with respect to efficiently using cache storage.
If storage systems are not properly managed, enterprises can lose valuable time and money when storage arrays are taken offline or shutdown. In these situations, applications are shutdown, storage devices are disconnected and reconnected, LUNs (logical unit numbers) are re-mapped, etc. While the storage arrays are offline, data flow and data ordering are disrupted and jeopardized.